It looks like it forceabily unloaded the Nvidia video drivers -- not good.

Not an Nvidia user, so this advice may not work, but I had serious video problems with my AMD chipset when I tried to install Mint 15 and solved them by going into the boot parms and adding "xforcevesa". I also tried "nomodeset" and while that worked, it forced a low res on me and would not properly recognize the displays.